Category: Global Collaboration

While at the Future of Education Technology Conference (FETC) I was able to hear from a lot of fantastic educators from all over the country. Yellkey is one of the many tools that were shared over the course of the conference. Specifically, I picked this tool up from Leslie Fisher. She has some awesome things going on at her newly revamped website (including great pricing on webinars) that you should check out!

WHO: Teachers that frequently share URLs in class but have issues with students using URL shorteners.

HOW: Visit http://www.yellkey.com/, paste in the URL to share, select a length of time for the key to exist, generate yellkey and share!

WHEN:Yellkey is great for situations that need to share a URL, but it does not need to be permanent. A prime example would be when you are giving a presentation at a conference and need the audience to quickly get to your shared slide deck. In the classroom, it is great for those quick websites that may not be shared links elsewhere. I plan to use it for the Google Form for Homecoming Court voting, the online ballots will be protected with required sign-in and the link will only be available through yellkey for a specific length of time.

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WHO: Administrators, team leaders, and teachers looking for an easy way to communicate with a group, set up to-do lists, and centralized storage for shared documents.

HOW: Sign up for a free account at https://wiggio.com, create a group, and start building! Wiggio is simple and straightforward to use. Users can create task/to-do lists that group members can easily check off, as well as set up meetings, upload documents, poll members, share links, and send direct messages. Group members can set up e-mail notifications of updates, and also have SMS notifications.

WHEN:Wiggio is a great tool for event planning and collaborative work. Teachers/coaches could also use this tool to communicate with groups like Student Council and sports teams. Administrators would find it beneficial for school committees. Students could use this Wiggio to effectively work on small group projects.

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HOW: Students ages 13-18 can enter their science project in to the Google Science Fair. If students need help coming up with ideas for a project, they can use the “Make It Better” generator or teachers can use the “Idea Toolkit” to help inspire students. Visit https://www.googlesciencefair.com/en/ to register and find more information.

WHEN: Deadline to register is 5/18/16, to view the entire timeline, click here.

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WHO: Teachers interested in having their class participate in creating an ebook about winter. Shannon Miller (@shannonmmiller) is looking for classes to collaborate on creating an ebook full of stories, songs, poems, and illustrations about winter.

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WHO: Teachers and Administrators who are looking for new ways to learn more about education, from fellow educators.

HOW: If you do not have a Twitter Account, you should. Even if you are just “lurking” (reading everyones tweets without participating in the conversation), you will still pick up a wealth of knowledge. Teachers are a group that love to share, especially with other like-minded individuals. There are chats on Twitter every night on a wide variety of topics. If there is something a teacher is remotely interested in, take a look at see if there is a chat about it. You may just find that there are others from all around the globe that have been trying new things in their classrooms and would love to make suggestions.

Having participated in Educational Chats over the past few years, I would recommend that you use TweetDeck which allows the user to create columns that focus on specific criteria, such as an account, hashtag, notifications, and more. I typically have a column for my notifications so that I am sure to respond to all direct comments to myself. A column for the chat itself, that way you can see the flow of conversation, and also a column for the chat moderator. This way you can see the Chat Topics as they are opened for discussion.

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HOW: Teachers act as league administrators. Students study countries before draft day, then take turns picking countries. Each day a score is given for each time a country is mentioned in the news. Just like a fantasy sports team, students can trade countries, or pick up unused countries. The teacher sets the number of days that the competition will run.

WHEN: This would be a great group project for a world history class, government class, current event class, etc.. Some student respond very well to competition, as this may be what it takes to get some students interested in the global world.

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Who: Teachers looking to engage students with writing by taking part in a worldwide project. Jon Smith (@theipodteacher) is looking for classes across the globe to take part in the second iteration of collaboration to create an iBook/ePub of student writing. The theme for #TWIMA2 is The World Is My Audience 2: Dreams Around The World

Below are the general guidelines for the project along with time frames. We are going to focus on dreams in this version of #twima. We will be using iBooks Author this time to increase the interactivity and ease of transferring your work to the book.

Part 1:
Have your class discuss dreams. The dreams they write about could be personal dreams, actual night dreams, dreams for the world, dreams of their culture or dreams that relate to academic areas they currently are part of (I can envision students writing about dreams of solving problems or placing themselves in historical events).

1. Have your class discuss dreams. The dreams they write about could be personal dreams, actual night dreams, dreams for the world, dreams of their culture or dreams that relate to academic areas they currently are part of (I can envision students writing about dreams of solving problems or placing themselves in historical events).

3. These written dreams may include artwork or photos your students create if they wish. Please make sure students use their own artwork and photos. I would like to avoid any copyright issues. If they choose photos from the internet, please make sure they are acceptable and copyright free.

Part 2:

Once the dreams are submitted, we will pass the written work on to another group of teachers and students who will take those written dreams and turn them into multimedia for the iBook. This media could be videos, photos, widgets and much, much more. The sky is truly the limit.

Part 3:

The final piece of this project will be taking all the written dreams and multimedia pieces and weaving them into one big story. Justin and his students have agreed to make the larger story based on the dreams your students develop. Don’t worry! Your student work will not be changed in any way. Their work will simply be woven into a larger story.

I love the idea of this project. It combines writing, technology, and dreaming! Let’s help Jon reach his goal of representing each state in the #TWIMA2 iBook! You can also visit #TWIMA on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/twima